Discussing Marcel Proust’s vast novel In Search of Lost
Time in his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that C.K.
Scott Moncrieff “died while translating the work, which is no wonder.” At more
than 1.2 million words and running into seven overflowing volumes, this
multi-faceted mega-novel contains such an overwhelming portrait of the interior
and exterior world that no individual English translator has ever taken it on
again. In 1981, Terence Kilmartin revised Scott Moncrieff’s translation
according to the 1954 French edition, and then in the late eighties D.J.
Enright revised it again, this time according it to the new Pléiade
edition, and then in the late nineties Penguin books forsook Moncrieff altogether and broke the task up among seven new translators, one for each volume. Each subsequent translation
has brought the novel closer to Proust’s actual words and intentions, which is
arguably the most important consideration, but none has captivated the
imagination the way that Scott Moncrieff’s did in the 1920s. One of the truly
magical reading experiences available to English-language readers, his version,
called Remembrance of Things Past after Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, largely
paraphrases and recasts Proust’s labyrinthine sentences into an English that’s
meant to mirror the original in ambience rather than in exactitude, and
although it’s become obsolete, his was the version that dramatically altered
the course of English and American Modernism. While he’s been rightfully
accused of “prettifying” Proust’s original, Scott Moncrieff still did an
immense service to the English language, and a new biography by his grand-niece
Jean Findlay largely sets the record straight about this remarkable translator.

Chasing Lost
Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator is in
equal parts literary biography, intricate family chronicle, brutal war
narrative, spy novel, spiritual examination, sex farce, and entirely
all-compassing portrait of a lost era. Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff (Scott
Moncrieff is his compound family name) was by most standards a complicated and
contradictory figure—a gay Catholic soldier, writer/critic/translator, aesthete,
and spy—but in this searching and thoroughgoing biography, all his parts adhere
together into an integrity rarely seen in our modern age of fractured meaning.
Not at all a family apologia, this is instead a richly layered excavation of
the spiraling strata of letters, diaries, writings, documentary records, and
reminiscences about a man for whom life had purpose and sense, and who created
a time and place in the universe for himself that he genuinely loved. A friend
and colleague of Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, the Waugh family, Robert Graves,
Noël Coward, and Wilfred Owen, among countless others, Scott Moncrieff cast an
enormous figure in the literature and mind of his time, and Findlay does a
seriously impressive job of drawing together every imaginable mention of him in
the era’s ceaselessly proliferating remembrances of things past.

C.K. Scott Moncrieff,painted by Edward Stanley (1919)

Like Proust, Scott Moncrieff was
born into an upper-middle-class family devoted to public service and was a
sensitive child who as a young man leaned toward literary dandyism. Both
writers immersed themselves in poetry and art, and both were fascinated by
Catholic iconography and significantly found an early idol in aesthetic art
critic John Ruskin. Unlike Proust, though, who due to infirmity was barely able
to fulfil his obligatory military service, Scott Moncrieff was thrust into the
darkest pit of the First World War, where he fully embraced Catholicism and
maintained a shockingly indefatigable spirit among all the horror. Findlay
reconstructs battles with extraordinary vividness and rigor, digging as deep
into the military archives as she does into personal memoirs, giving as
comprehensive a view of Scott Moncrieff’s battalion within the ever-shifting
military theater as she does of his own individual war experience. Although she
thankfully doesn’t try to ape Proust’s style, she follows threads in the same
way he does, and the details that she focuses on form a Proustian trail of
scintillating imagery, such as the shards of the destroyed Ypres cathedral’s
stained glass that he found and carried with him and then passed parts of to
another fellow-soldier, or the Bible in which he dutifully noted every time and
place he took communion while serving, forming an intricate military and
spiritual itinerary across Europe.

Although very seriously wounded in
battle, Scott Moncrieff remained largely unfazed by the terribleness of it all,
unlike so many of his friends who were stricken with what we today call
post-traumatic stress disorder. Seeing innumerable fellow combatants devoured
by this unprecedented new kind of war, he actually seemed to have a positive
experience as a soldier. Part of this was because of his new faith, which made
everything seem magical and sacred—a common phenomenon during times of extreme terror—but
part of it was that he was simply blessed with solid mental health, and it’s thoroughly
remarkable to read the biography of a literary person who just didn’t suffer
the way thatso many other sensitive people do. He does grow quite a bit,
however, especially after nearly losing his leg in battle. Serving from the
home front after a very long recuperation, he attempted to steer his friends
and fellow poets to safer assignments, and his inability to keep the remarkable
Wilfred Owen alive marked a serious turning point for him. Having been one of
the poet-critics to foster and tutor the budding new poet, encouraging him to
explore the assonance and consonance of the Old French martial epic the Song
of Roland, which Scott Moncrieff was translating into English as a kind of
solace for no longer being able to fight himself, he saw Owen’s lightning-like
artistic development far eclipse his own, and it’s after the junior poet’s
death in battle that he stopped thinking of himself as a poet anymore.

Turning toward translation after
the success of his version of the Song of Roland, he followed it with
the similarly bellicose Beowulf, and then he found his true purpose:
Proust. For many people, reading Proust for the first time is a nearly
religious experience, and to see Scott Moncrieff become totally consumed with
it is a similarly thrilling experience. At the same time he took an assignment
as a low-level spy for England in Mussolini’s Italy under the cover of the
passport office, a job he’d partly created when he was at the War Office, and
combining this with his translation fees, he was able to support an
ever-expanding network of family and non-family dependents. Living in fascist
Italy also allowed him a much freer sex life than he’d had in Edwardian
England—a terrible irony if there ever was one—and he recounted it all in
hilarious detail in his life-long correspondence with Vyvyan Holland, one of
Oscar Wilde’s sons. As gleefully promiscuous a translator as he was a lover,
his insatiable interests often took him away from Proust as he became sidetracked
by Stendahl and then discovered Pirandello, who was his other major
contribution to English letters. Part of this was foot-dragging over the
translation of Sodom and Gomorrah, fearing that Proust’s frank
depictions of homosexuality would run him afoul of English obscenity laws, and
unfortunately this cost him a lot of time and resulted in an even more
euphemistically paraphrased translation, which is one of this remarkable
biography’s only true bummers.

Jean Findlay

Regarding Scott Moncrieff’s faith
and sexuality, Findlay makes the extraordinary point that part of Catholicism’s
appeal for him was that it offered him perpetual forgiveness, which was a stark
contrast to the unbending Protestantism of his native Scotland. For him Catholicism
was a religion that actually allowed and expected him to be a sinner.
Although seemingly a nonbeliever herself, Findlay’s portrait of her
great-uncle’s faith experience is imbued with the magic of a G.K. Chesterton or
Graham Greene novel, making his rapid life and death (at age forty, from
cancer, with a volume of Proust to go) feel nonetheless whole and satisfying,
because that’s how it felt to him. Entirely humbled by greater writers and
having recognized his own intermediate role, as his translations swept England
and America he even turned down an advance to write a novel of his own. Not at
all unctuous or self-aggrandizing, he was simply a happy servant of literature
and life whose individualized niche allowed him to shine in his own way.
Similarly, this surprisingly luminous biography highlights its subject without
drawing attention to itself, yet it nonetheless glows too. Findlay holds Scott
Moncrieff up to our fascinated attention, and after a while the reader begins
to notice Findlay’s own varied and intricate attentiveness just as much. As
with Proust, the reader marvels at how much and how well she notices, and at
her seemingly limitless resourcefulness. Unlike Scott Moncrieff and Proust
himself, who were both unable to finish their lives’ work, Findlay seems with
this book to have actually recaptured lost time.